Trial By Fire

Blackhawk would be the fastest and simplest way to destroy it.

But that didn’t make any sense. For one thing, all the H-K would have had to do was nudge its armored nose or flank into the Blackhawk’s main rotor hard enough to shatter it. A chopper without a rotor wasn’t going anywhere. Alternatively, it could have just dropped straight down on top of the Blackhawk instead of wasting time dancing with it.

And finally, the damn thing hadn’t been out of ammo. Barnes had proved that himself by blowing up the Gatling guns’ ammo canisters.

Had Skynet been trying to take him and Williams alive, then? That idea sent a shiver up Barnes’s back that had nothing to do with the night air. Especially after that glimpse of hell he’d had in San Francisco when they were busting Connor out.

But wanting to capture the chopper’s crew still didn’t explain not wrecking the chopper itself.

Unless it was the chopper that Skynet actually wanted.

Barnes chewed at his lip. Even before San Francisco had gone up in Connor’s massive explosion Skynet had been running low on resources. Their own experience with the L.A. supply depot had proved that.

But could it really be hurting so badly for aircraft that it would stoop to stealing Blackhawks?

Especially this particular Blackhawk. It was typical of what the Resistance had to work with these days: old, tired, and patched in a dozen places, with engines that had been revamped, rebuilt, and were held together with spit and curses. It was purely through the minor miracles of people like their genius mechanic Wince that aircraft like this were even still flying. The H-K itself had been in far better shape.

Not now, of course. But it had been when it started out. Yet Skynet had apparently been willing to gamble it for the Blackhawk.

And then, abruptly, he got it.

Skynet didn’t want just a Blackhawk. It wanted a Resistance Blackhawk, with all the flaws and patchwork that any genuine Resistance fighter would automatically know to look for.

Skynet was looking for an infiltration vehicle.

Cyberdyne Systems Model 101. Connor had muttered that over and over as Barnes and Wright carried him out of the San Francisco hellhole. When Barnes had asked Kate about it later, she’d told him the 101 was part of a new Terminator series, the T-800s. She’d described them as Skynet’s first attempt at a serious infiltrator model, with human flesh covering an updated version of the T-700 endoskeleton.

How she could possibly know things like that Barnes couldn’t guess. She’d been pretty vague when he’d asked her about it. Probably something Connor had learned from Command, before Command had gotten itself killed.

Kate had also expressed hope that all the T-800s been destroyed in the explosion. That was one of the reasons, Barnes gathered, why Connor was spending the time and resources to sift through the wreckage. Not just to eliminate any remaining T-600s and T-700s, but also to look for any of the newer models that might have survived.

Maybe one of them had. At least one. And Skynet wanted a genuine Resistance chopper to take it to whatever Resistance group it was planning to infiltrate.

Maybe even Connor’s group.

Barnes bared his teeth. Well, the damn computer wasn’t going to get this chopper, anyway. Not if he had anything to say about it.

Williams didn’t even twitch as Barnes climbed carefully back up into the chopper’s cockpit. Either the woman was a lot more tired than he was, or else she simply felt safer with Barnes on watch than he did when she was pulling that duty.

Or else the injury to her leg had driven her into a deeper sleep than usual. He glanced at the limb, feeling a brief flicker of guilt. He’d run her harder that afternoon than he’d probably needed to.

The guilt vanished. She still owed him for that crack about his brother. Lying on his back, he hunched up beneath one of the equipment access covers that Wince had put in and popped it open.

Ten minutes later, he closed it again. He didn’t know anything about chopper electronics, but he knew a jury-rigged circuit when he saw one, and the power wires to the auxiliary fan Wince had installed in the cockpit to help airflow was easy to spot among the mass of other wires.

And as it so often had, Barnes’s pre-Judgment Day expertise in hot-wiring cars had come in handy.

Getting back to his feet, he took one final look at the sleeping Williams. Connor wanted him to forgive her, he knew. Williams probably wanted him to, as well.

But he wouldn’t. He couldn’t. Not after what she’d done to him.

Not ever.

He climbed back out onto the ground, his boots making little squeaking sounds on the cold sand. He took a moment to give the area around them a careful scan, then headed back out to continue walking his perimeter.

They would follow that cable, just like Williams wanted. Not because she was the pilot and had the final say, but because Skynet was up to something, and there was at least a chance it had to do with the cable.

And when the trail ended, whatever they found at the end of it, he was going to head back to San Francisco to alert Connor about this new T-800 threat. Even if he had to walk.

Even if he had to drag Williams by her sore leg the whole way.

It was a couple of hours before dawn when Jik finally reached the old bridge.

To discover that he was too late. Standing rigidly a meter from the foot of the rickety crossing, its eyes a pair of glowing red embers in the night, was the dark metallic form of a T-700.

For a long minute Jik gazed through the trees at the machine, his mind and heart sinking beneath a bitter wave of defeat. All his hopes and stamina had been focused on this bridge, this frail interweaving of rope and wood. For it to have been so casually snatched away from him was a crushing blow.

Sternly, Jik forced away the emotion. Self-pity was a trap, and he knew better than to let it get hold of him. He’d had more than his share of disappointments and reversals throughout his lifetime, and he’d managed to get over, around, or through every one of them. He’d get around this one, too. All he needed was a little thought, a little planning, and a little ingenuity.

None of which he had at the moment, and none of which he was likely to get until he’d burned some of the fatigue from his mind and body. Taking a final look at the Terminator’s positioning, and the big Heckler & Koch G11 submachinegun gripped in its skeletal hand, he carefully backed away from the river gorge and headed into the deep woods.

A quarter mile away, right where he remembered it, he found the old cabin, looking even more dilapidated than it had forty years ago. The door opened about half a foot and then jammed, and it took some serious sweat and leverage to get it open far enough for him to slip through.

The interior was every bit as dreary as the exterior. To one side was an old cot with deep tears in the canvas, partially covered by a thin mattress that smelled heavily of mold and mildew. Hanging over the cot on a set of hooks was an old rifle of a make and model he didn’t recognize and a thick coil of weathered and fragile-looking rope. To the other side was the cabin’s lone window, broken of course. In the corner between the window and the door was a rusty pot-bellied stove, with a few chunks of firewood lying on the floor nearby.

For a moment Jik looked longingly at the stove and the wood, then turned resolutely away. A roaring fire would go a long way toward banishing the cabin’s damp and chill.

But from the looks of the stove and kinked chimney, it would be a tossup as to whether he would asphyxiate himself or simply burn the whole place down. Worse, the smoke might attract the attention of the Terminator by the river. If that happened, smoke inhalation and third-degree burns would be the least of his problems.

Unless, of course, Jik wasn’t actually here at the time...

He felt a tight grin crease his cheeks. The obvious solution to his problem, and he felt like an idiot for not spotting it sooner.

His first impulse was to grab a couple of chunks of wood and get to work. His second, wiser thought was the reminder that racing through an unfamiliar forest after a tiring hike would be a dangerous and stupid thing to do. Particularly given that he might well end up with the Terminator on his tail. The smoke trick would work just as well in the daylight, after he’d gotten a few hours of sleep.

His first task was to get the sodden mattress off the cot and lug it outside. After that came a quick